Membership Soars In Black Fraternities, Sororities

October 05, 1989|By New York Times News Service.

Black fraternities and sororities, long criticized by some blacks as divisive and elitist, are attracting record numbers of young people, particularly on many predominantly white campuses torn by racial tension.

The groups, an outgrowth of segregation days when blacks could not join white fraternal organizations, are among the most influential and best-endowed of all black organizations. Their members commit themselves to service long after their college days are over.

The organizations have long offered scholarships and other assistance to needy blacks, and they are now running low-income housing projects, sending food and supplies to Africa and taking a lead in fighting illiteracy, drug abuse and other problems plaguing black Americans.

At the same time that they are building membership and programs, the groups have been involved in soul-searching because of criticism of their initiation rites.

Such military-like rituals as wearing uniforms and requiring pledges to walk in lock step and salute members have come under fire as the groups expand to mostly white colleges where administrators are tightening rules against hazing, rules aimed at all Greek-letter organizations.

The groups are also coming under greater scrutiny because of the crowds they attract to their precision dance routines, called step shows.

It was such an event in early September that drew tens of thousands to Virginia Beach, Va., where rioting and looting occurred.

While precise figures are not available from all black Greek-letter groups, several said they are unable to open new chapters fast enough on predominantly white campuses, despite a decline in black enrollment at many colleges.

Omega Psi Phi fraternity has been starting a new chapter every month for two years, and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity has grown in the last five years to about 350 chapters from about 250.

``We have another 100 chapters pending that we haven`t even got to yet,`` said James Blanton, executive director of Alpha Phi Alpha.

On many mostly white campuses, the draw of the fraternities appears to be the desire to band together in the face of rising racial tension.

At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where there was a clash between black and white students in 1986, membership in the university`s black Greek-letter groups rose to more than 100 last year from 12 the year before the incident.

This is on a campus with slightly more than 400 black students, said Ricardo Townes, associate dean of students. In all, about 26,600 students are enrolled at the school.

And at the University of Michigan, where racial slurs aimed at blacks were broadcast on the campus radio station two years ago and antiblack fliers were distributed, there has been a surge in membership at nearly all the black organizations, students and administrators say.

``There`s a feeling now of wanting to get to know black people immediately rather than being a lone black person on this big white campus for any longer than you have to,`` said Kristi Ann Johnson, a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority at the University of Michigan.

Interest appeared equally high at predominantly black colleges, where students are attracted by the tradition and the high visibility of Greek-letter groups, and where competition for admission is often more intense than at white colleges because there are more students for the groups to choose from.

The groups began in 1906 when seven black men at Cornell University, barred from white fraternities, started their own, Alpha Phi Alpha.

Psychologists and historians say that because of decades of being discriminated against, many blacks may prize the exclusivity in these groups, the vestiges of segregation, all the more.

``There are so many things that people of African descent have been excluded from that when they find an elite group, they may want so much to be part of it that they subject themselves to things they ordinarily would not,`` said Dr. Linda James Myers, an associate professor of psychology and black studies at Ohio State University.

``It can come out of a sense of inferiority and insecurity and the need for recognition and support.``

Although there have been instances of blacks occasionally joining white fraternities and sororities and vice versa, life in the Greek-letter organizations remains perhaps the most racially segregated of all campus activities at many universities.

Critics say the groups foster divisiveness. Fraternity and sorority members say that they merely reflect the campus norms and that peer pressure is so great that few people from one race consider pledging an organization dominated by another.